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Healthy communities

The Healthy Communities priority is about engaging and empowering communities to enhance the things that keep people happy and healthy.  Our approach is asset based, working with the skills, knowledge, and experience that strengthen trust, social networks and civic engagement.  We want to do this in a way that inverts the power to act by shifting power and control away from services and professionals and giving a voice to those who are marginalised and seldom heard.

Our initial focus will be on the areas below.

  • Integrated neighbourhood teams – this will see different services working together at neighbourhood level with a proactive approach that keeps people ‘happy, healthy at home’
  • Streamlined access – making it easier for people to receive the care they need with right professional and at the right time
  • Creating the environment for change – this will include looking at how we use the skills of our health and care workforce, make better use of our community assets (people, buildings and technology) and listening to what matters to people
  • Personalised care for those who need it – ‘in a way that is meaningful and matters to me’
  • Helping people to stay well for longer

To make structural change work it has to be led by cultural change.  It is just as important that we create an environment that supports local change not dictates it; we need to energise local ambition.  The pace at which we create the right environment, underpinned by workforce, estates and data, directly impacts on the speed at which the model can be delivered in every neighbourhood.

We are ready to reimagine how we might deliver care in the future and to organise ourselves differently and better.

Our purpose

Our purpose is to involve everyone and we know that where the direction of travel is co-produced and agreed, local teams have the confidence and opportunity to create their own ways of working, within a framework, that the whole system understands and can work with.  Our model will be focused on what makes a difference, or addressing improvements and challenges, rather than a structural model.

Our population

Our population a common set of priorities make it easier to assess the impact of change for citizens, service users, our teams and the system-wide benefits.  With a consistent framework, common elements of our approach and way of delivering can be consistently used across each community or locality, but in a way that reflects the diverse needs of the populations and their local networks and resources (their community-based infrastructure).

Our partnership

Our partnership we are working with the Reducing Inequalities Alliance to identify a small number of things to target.  The ‘what’ will be same, and how that works at a locality or community level can, and should, be different.  We know we need checks and balances, but they be with a light touch, including it being ok to test and it not to work.  The learning of failure is equally valuable and we will be agile enough to reset and change direction.  We can set parameters, without them getting in the way of innovation.

See the programmes of work in our priority area

Ageing well

Virtual wards